evdubs

Assuming your comment applies to Common Lisp as well, if Scheme (and Lisp) truly was, "hard to read, unfit for most purposes and that even proficient coders never seem to fully grasp," it wouldn't be the language that introduced so many features later implemented in other languages.

> Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read–eval–print loop.

So many proficient coders were able to grasp features of Lisp, find the fitness of those features, and implement them in their own languages.

> types don’t have their core functions associated with them concretely.

They do in Racket? You look at the "List" documentation and you find all of the functions for lists. Likewise with hash tables, numbers, strings, sequences, files, etc.

> The only way to know strcat, puts, and strlen exist is…

... to look at the documentation on docs.racket-lang.org. The powerful search includes results not only for the standard ("batteries included") library reference, but also the standard guide and 3rd party libraries.

> once I had my traits that I also wanted compile-time attributes à la Rust/C# and there’s no clean way to add those to Lisp’s syntax

I mean, why are you not able to do (trait whatever) before (define whatever) or (for-each whatever) or (let whatever)?

> Lisp is neat but it just doesn’t fit in the future of programming that Rust and C#

Have you tried it or did you just try to figure out why you don't think you like it from an LLM?

> Widespread supply chain attacks.

This is a bad thing.

What's the likelihood that universities eventually become open model providers?

> would be the worst geopolitical move of the century

From a political perspective, perhaps.

> doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do

From a military perspective, taking Taiwan by force would allow China to, "threaten the sea lines of communication and to strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is unlikely to otherwise be able to do." Taiwan would give China access to the Philippine Sea. https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2022-green.pdf

Their valuation is crazy. Trading at $260, with no profit, their price:sales ratio was 36x (extremely high). Now, trading at $195, their price:forward earnings ratio is 130x (extremely high). Unless they crushed earnings and revenue estimates and juiced their forward guidance, Cloudflare stock could have gone anywhere. Also, the stock is trading where it was a month ago.

Indeed. COIN releases earnings on May 7 in the evening. Q4 2025 was the first quarter where they had a negative EPS in the past couple years. Most analyst estimates for Q1 2026 are trending downward. This "difficult decision" seems to be all about getting in front of a bad earnings release.

With the hope of receiving a reply with proof....

There is absolutely no way a 3 month old is potty trained. As in, the 3 month old infant can communicate and use a toilet. They likely can't even hold their head up at that age.

https://www.babycenter.com/baby/diapering/infant-potty-train... indicates that a potty can be introduced from 4- to 6-months old. Potty trained by 18 months is much more reasonable.

> Lisp hackers have been effortlessly reshaping the language for decades using the powerful macro system and extending and bending the language to their will.

I've written a bit of Racket code (https://github.com/evdubs?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language...) and I still haven't written a macro. In only one case did I even think a macro would be useful: merging class member definitions to include both the type and the default value on the same line. It's sort of a shame that Racket, a Scheme with a much larger standard library and many great user-contributed libraries, has to deal with the Scheme/Lisp marketing of "you can build low level tools with macros" when it's more likely that Racket developers won't need to write macros since they're already written and part of the standard library.

> But the success of Parsec has filled Hackage with hundreds of bespoke DSLs for everything. One for parsing, one for XML, one for generating PDFs. Each is completely different, and each demands its own learning curve. Consider parsing XML, mutating it based on some JSON from a web API, and writing it to a PDF.

What a missed opportunity to preach another gospel of Lisp: s-expressions. XML and JSON are forms of data that are likely not native to the programming language you're using (the exception being JSON in JavaScript). What is better than XML or JSON? s-expressions. How do Lisp developers deal with XML and JSON? Convert it to s-expressions. What about defining data? Since you have s-expressions, you aren't limited to XML and JSON and you can instead use sorted maps for your data or use proper dates for your data; you don't need to fit everything into the array, hash, string, and float buckets as you would with JSON.

If you've been hearing about Lisp and you get turned off by all of this "you can build a DSL and use better macros" marketing, Racket has been a much more comfortable environment for a developer used to languages with large standard libraries like Java and C#.

This is my experience, too, and my solution has been to run Debian.

Doesn't snap come back on the next OS upgrade?

I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.

I, too, have used it. It works well and is especially great for data sharing.

There must be a table with three columns and 4-6 rows.

You specify which software patents you want it to use?

> When I read Rob's work and learn from it, and make it part of my cognitive core, nobody is particularly threatened by it. When a machine does the same it feels very threatening to many people, a kind of theft by an alien creature busily consuming us all and shitting out slop.

It's not about reading. It's about output. When you start producing output in line with Rob's work that is confidently incorrect and sloppy, people will feel just as they do when LLMs produce output that is confidently incorrect and sloppy. No one is threatened if someone trains an LLM and does nothing with it.

Is there no Apache Commons for Javascript? It'd be nice to have a large library from a 'trusted' group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Commons

I am not so sure how it works, but you can define your own evaluation handler for `eval` which, I assume, can be as restrictive as you need if you're dealing with untrusted data.

> Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.

Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions are a better version of JSON and are first class components of Lisp.

Java has the VisualVM. https://visualvm.github.io/

I would love a similar tool for Racket.

I use it for trading options.

https://github.com/evdubs/renegade-way

Ponzi schemes collapse when the participants ask for their money back (redemptions). Tether handled $17B in redemptions in 2022 when their market cap peaked at $83B.

The auditor BDO publishes attestations every quarter.

https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports

You don't need to trust them, just BDO who attests to Tether's holdings.

Tether banks with Cantor Fitzgerald. Everyone trading large amounts of US Treasury bills knows who Cantor Fitzgerald is.

You're not paying attention, or you are wilfully ignoring the evidence.

Tether banks with Cantor Fitzgerald, a primary dealer with the Federal Reserve. From 2023: https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/wall-street-firm-over...

Every quarter, BDO confirms Tether's assets by going to Tether's banking partners directly.

https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports

Attestation reports. Every quarter, BDO confirms holdings directly with Tether's banking partners.

https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports

It was known in early 2023.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/wall-street-firm-over...

This obscures the fact that umpires are worse than 93% when the pitch is close to the boundary of being a ball or a strike (shadow zone). Obvious balls and obvious strikes are obvious, but umpire accuracy when it is close is only 81%, and their accuracy was even worse 15 years ago.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/strike-three-lets-check-in-on-um...

You can see the zones that are deprecated at https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/tzdata-legacy/filelist

I also ran into this using:

- Debian 13

- Interactive Brokers' Trader Workstation

- Racket's `gregor` date and time library

IBKR still sends the old, deprecated US/* timezones. As noted in the article, the solution is to `apt install tzdata-legacy`.